Secret Customs and Rituals of the Templars

The history, the doctrines and
the secret rituals of the Templars have incited, vexed and bewildered humanity
for about 1.000 years. Since 1119. It was the year when nine knights from the
South of France, who had already passed through the purgatory of the First
Crusade, decided to found a new Order, with both military and sacerdotal
valences: the Order of the Templar Knights. Or, by its official name: the Order
of the Poor Knights of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon.

Scholars, writers, professors and
army generals, high priests, politicians and artists, businessmen, historians
and average men keep on asking themselves - astonished and curious - when they
face a huge worldwide mystery: Who are the Templars? Where did they come from?
What kind of people were they? How did they live? What were their secret
rituals?

Almost a millennium before the
Christian Era, in Jerusalem, it had been raised the Temple of Solomon, the
first edifice made of stone, cedar wood, copper, silver and gold, built by the
Jews for the glory of the god of the storm - YAHWEH - who later became, under
different names, the God of the three great religions of the world: Mosaism,
Christianity and Islamism. After almost half a millennium, the Temple of Solomon was to be swept away by bloody invaders. On the Temple's old foundations,
Zerubbabel raised a new edifice, with the same destination: the House of God.
Several centuries later, the Temple was again demolished by the blind fury of
the barbarians. And it was rebuilt again under the rule of the almighty king
Herod. In the unfortunate year 70 of the Christian Era, the Temple of Jerusalem - Herod's Temple - was swept away too by the legions of Titus, the son of
Vespasian, the future emperor of Rome.

Yet - under any circumstances -
let's not forget that the Jewish people is surnamed the chosen people: because
it took over, intact, the huge and high Sumerian culture, entrusting it later
to the Egyptians to keep and fructify. But is it possible, we wonder today,
that the people of Moses should have entrusted the Pharaohs and the Osyrian
priests with the entire Sumerian knowledge? The Bible is full of keys that can
answer this question. We just don't know which these magic keys are. Will we
ever find them? What unsolvable mysteries does the Old Testament hide in its
infinite horizon? What about the New Testament that tells us about the origins
of Christianity? Under the Temple of Solomon there are precious treasures of
spirituality, science and philosophy. Did the Templars have access to them? Did
they discover them? Didn't they? Could it be a mere legend? Then where from and
how and on the occasion of what miracle did the Templars leave us - in a
strange and tragic destiny of history - an enormous spiritual, material and
scientific heritage from which the most beautiful, mysterious and lasting of
the world's buildings came to life? Where and whom did the Templars learn the
mysteries of sacred geometry from? Who disclosed them the science of financial
transactions, on which the operative structures of the International Monetary
Fund is based today? From whom and how did the Templars took over that superb
culture that would release the pompous phenomenon of the second millennium of
the Christian Era: the Renaissance? These are questions that perhaps will never
be answered entirely. Only fragments of truth, ill-assorted ideas, passing
sequences from an illustrious and secret reality, to feed our petty vanities
and maintain the illusion that we are seeking for the Lost Word! That is
exactly what I'm going to do, in these humble lines, gathered from a few
shelves of read books and then squandered in my soul burnt by an eternal
question: what occult power have skyrocketed the Templars beginning with 1119 -
and from then, on and on - on the top of the magnificent spiritual and material
construction?

Therefore, a group of eight
French knights led by the enigmatic Hugues de Payen came to the ruins of the Jerusalem Temple, founded the nucleus of the future Order of the Templars and had dug
there, for nine years, a vast and sophisticated web of tunnels with patience,
zeal and promethean effort. What were they looking for? Did they find anything?
What exactly? The secret rituals of the Templars originate in that fortunate
moment. Like an occult heritage. We know today a small part of the secret
symbols and rituals of the Templars. But we don't know exactly what reality is
hidden behind them. We still have a certainty: ever since the Templars appeared
on Earth, the face of the world has changed fundamentally and irreversibly
towards light. Towards self-recognition. That is towards God.

The majority of the documents -
presenting us the Templars - come from the sober period of 1307-1314. From the
times when a pope who was greedy for power, Clement V, and a king greedy for
fortune, Philip IV, supported by the most bloody torture instrument of Vatican
- the efficient Inquisition - generated and developed a huge criminal
conspiracy against Templars. What secret and terrible result did this death
hatred generate? Some historians assume that the reason for this exterminating
ordeal was the irresistible temptation to grab the immense fortunes of the
Templars. Others say that it was only a political game - a political exchange,
actually - between the pope and the king. Many scholars thought the reason was
the enormous military and religious power of the Templars. What is the truth?
Perhaps all of these presuppositions are nothing else but different facets of
one and the same gigantic black diamond. Will we ever find out the whole truth?

Anyway, the so-called historical
truth, born and spread from the torture catacombs of Inquisition, made official
with the Act of accusation constructed by the Pontifical Curia, is not more
than a gloomy and ignoble lie, that has trodden among our consciences for about
seven centuries. How could torture become the way to the truth?! It's customary
that we leave to the poor and the wiseacres the morbid satisfaction that the
Templars would have been depraved, uneducated and filthy scoundrels, the way Inquisition
wrote in the collective memory.

On the contrary, the purity and
the high morality of the Templars, their bright and altruistic spirit, their
superior intelligence, wisdom, courage and power of sacrifice in the name of
truth, their constructive gift results notably in their customs, symbols and
secret rituals - few, as we came to know - if we know how to ponder on them
with pure thoughts.

In the Order's Temples they
hoarded and kept with infinite care the important scientific, religious and
philosophical knowledge. The Templars transformed alchemy into science; the
sacred geometry into sophisticated and lasting cathedrals, castles, basilicas;
and the abstruseness into a revolutionary philosophy. The secret ceremonies
were officiated in certain halls of the Temples, named penitence tombs. This is
where they venerated the God of all men, the unique God of the universe, the
later Great Architect of the Universe in Universal Masonry, a God who still has
different names. However, this was the most important accusation brought to the
so-called heresy of the Templars. The Saint Office in Rome did not admit,
whatsoever, that people - Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindoos, etc. - have a
single God, actually.

There, in the penitence tombs,
the Templars developed their secret rituals, practising the forgiveness of sins
in the Christian spirit. The Grand Master said, with a strong voice, at the end
of the ritual: "All the confessed sins, as well as those you didn't
confess because you were ashamed or scared of the punishment, I pray God to
forgive them to you".

Animated by a profound human
solidarity, the Templars promoted tolerance and the spirit of charity.
Equality, Fraternity and Liberty. On the altar of the penitence tomb they were
sworn in the oath of silence.

In an epoch when the Christian
moral reduced the woman to a secondary role, not to say peripherical, excluding
her from the clergy, the Templars decorated their Temple with the Flamed Star
with five corners, symbolising Venus, goddess of love. They respected and
adored the woman, lifting her even above the moral status of the man. An
article of their secret Regulation stipulated explicitly: "Ne ordo diffamaretur
pro mulieribus" (that is the Order must not be libelled to women).

The Templars weren't only a bunch
of devout and courageous Christian knights. They were in the same time
scientists, brilliant constructors, philosophers with a spirit forever open to
knowledge, inventors of financial instruments and beholders of some huge and
tormenting secrets about the history of the world in general, and of the
origins of Christianity in special. A trifling part of their immense cryptic
message is still carved today on the walls of the notorious Rosslyn Chapel.
Creatively, this message was taken over by the York Rite of Universal Masonry.

The Templars cultivated - in
their secret rituals - the human fraternity and the self-esteem, these being
actually the keys of the Renaissance movement later. Their unalterable faith
was that God had put divine seed in every man. The divine gift lies within the
human being. Moreover, the Templars, in their rituals, declaimed a well-known
verse of Hermes Trismegistus: "Or is it that you don't know that you,
yourselves, are the sons of God?"

Each Templar Brother was
encouraged - during the ritual - to explore by himself both the world around
him and, especially, that lying within him, thus experiencing live the gnosis:
the cognition of the divine.

The Templars practised a profound
and developed school of the mysteries: the oath of faith, the oath of silence,
the taxed initiation as spiritual resurrection, esoteric science as a means of
communication, they promoted abstruseness, they knew the principles of alchemy
and sacred geometry, they used - in all of their nine degrees - cabalistic
symbols, Christian symbols, as well as elements from the Royal Art of the
Osyrian Temples. The Templars knew the secret of the numbers, the demiurgic
power of the human mind, but also the precipice a man can fall into, pushed by
an ossified thinking. The Templars - as well as Modern Masonry - disowned
dogmas, considering that they locked up the gates of human knowledge. The great
thinker of the 19th century, Eliphas Levi, wrote with a firm conviction:
"The Templars have been the only beholders of the great religious, social
and scientific secrets".

By now, the entire world of the
scholars knows that Saint John the Baptist has been the patron of the Templars.
And, not by chance, he is today the patron of Masons. During time, a pious
confusion has developed between John the Baptist and John the Revelator. The
cult halls of the Templars were also called Temples of St. John's Order. In the
same time, we must mention that the interior, superior nucleus of the Templars
was integrated in a secret ritual that venerated Mary Magdalena, as a symbol of
the feminine principle, originating in the

Flamed Star of goddess Venus.
Where do these characteristic features - with a vague meaning of heresy - in
the secret rituals of the Templars come from? Is their origin located in the
tunnels dug under the millenary foundations of Solomon's Temple? From the 78
Gospels of the parents of primitive Christianity, the Christian Church - at the
Council in Niceea, in 325 - recognized only four Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke
and John. What about the other 74? Did the Templars know their content? The
texts from Nag Hammadi in 1945, as well as the Scrolls of the Dead Sea,
discovered in 1947, brought up several revealing details about the origins of
Christianity, confirming, after almost seven centuries, the secret rituals of
the Templars. The scholar Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair affirmed rightfully:
"The Order of the Temple was the sword bearer of the Church of St. John the Baptist,
but also the leader of the first Christian dynasty". In the same
time, we mention that the notorious "Les Dossiers Secrets" revealed the
same shocking truth: "The secret rituals of the Templars encrypted
fundamental information about the origins of Christianity".

One of the illustrious supporters
of the Templars was Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) whose well-known
"Inferno" is nothing than an ample and bright poem about the universe
of the knights of St. John's Order and their gnosis.

The reputed historian scholars
Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, in their recent and massive treatise "The
Mysteries of the Templars", affirm: "The documents about the Templars
have been either destroyed or censored, and what is left to posterity was the
persecutors' version (...) Thus, the majority of the documents and stories
about the Templars come from their enemies" (Q.E.D.)

The Templars were eager for
knowledge; their main effort was to find the truth. The real historical truth.
The Christian truth. The eternal human truth. If we call the Templars heretics,
it will be because they didn't follow the biblical dogma: "Believe and
don't search". First, they searched, studied, analysed and only after that
there was faith, as a natural course of human condition.

The Templars gathered information
throughout the world: from the Arabians they took the principles of sacred
geometry; from the catarrhs, the Gnosticism; from the Egyptians, the cult of
the divine couple Osyris-Isis; beneath the foundations of the Jerusalem Temple
they discovered the origins of Christianity; from the Jews, the philosophy of
Cabala; from the Greeks, the rationalism; from the Romans, the cult for law and
order.

At the famous Convention in
Wilhelmsbad in 1782, they tried to clarify, once and for all, the complex
problem of the secret rituals of the Templars. In one of the documents of the
Convention (record card RST-18), a few of the components of the Knights of St.
John's Order rituals are detailed: the invocation of the unique God of all the
people, the cult of St. John and Mary Magdalena; the triple fraternal hug; the
sign of the cross as an ancient symbol of the temples of Osyris and the
Christian sacrifice; the rose as a symbol of love and regeneration, an esoteric
project, later embodied in the notorious Order of Rose Croix; also, the
Templars used in their rituals the cup of libations, the four fundamental tests
of initiation: water, earth, fire, air; the consecration was done under the
sword, they practised the spirit of charity, tolerance, but also courage; they
studied and promoted the seven liberal arts; they used the incensing and the
oiling with Nard Mirth during initiation. Moreover, the new initiated was
called: the oiled one.

Today we're wondering -
astonished - how was it possible for such illustrious, powerful and courageous
men such as the Templars to become so easily the prey of ephemeral and menial
political plots, allowing themselves to be massacred by a bunch of royal and
clerical clerks? The answer is very simple indeed: one of the articles of the
Secret Regulation of the Templars forbade them totally to fight against
Christians. And the Templars obeyed strictly their law, even if the price was
the supreme sacrifice.

Another tormenting question is:
did the Templars disappear after the massacre between 1307-1314? The reputed
opera singer Emma Calvé wrote in her autobiographical book: "In the
Cabrieres castle, in 1894, knights of the Order of the Temple were still
living". Count Cagliostro (1743-1795) wrote in his vast treatise "Arcana
Arcanorum" in 1782: "Not only did the Templars disappear after the
terrible 1314, but they organised themselves better, they lived
surreptitiously, continuing to influence favourably the world's path towards
civilisation".

I would like to end these humble
considerations about the Templars with the title of a book by scholar Gerard de
Séde, published in 1962: "Les Templiers sont parmis nous" (The Templars
Are Among Us).